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Doctor K (character)
Doctor K is a genius scientist who is the creator of the Ranger Operators' tech and arsenal, and the mentor to the RPM Rangers. She was also the creator of the Venjix Virus, which was unintentionally spread worldwide, conquering Earth. About Doctor K is a blunt and straight-to-the-point, socially inept, youthful scientist with a genius intellect. She is a workaholic and rarely, if ever, stops to rest from her task of creating equipment for the Rangers and monitoring other methods of keeping Corinth City safe. For a particular reason, aside from the occasional slip up, Doctor K refuses to call the Rangers by anything other than their Ranger color, much to their growing concern and annoyance. She will often outright state if she doesn't like someone or doesn't approve of something about them, most notably with Ziggy and the genetically-engineered twins Gem and Gemma. When the latter were first introduced to her, she immediately showed dislike towards them, telling them to stop speaking to her in conjoined sentences. Doctor K is musically inclined, able to skillfully play both the piano and the violin, and even uses specifically the violin in conjunction with some of the equipment within the Ranger base. Despite her stern personality traits, she oddly seems to have a subconscious affinity towards cute things, as evidenced by the questionably cartoony anime-esque Zord designs and her childish sleeping attire (a matching top and bottom pajama set with an alphabet pattern with fuzzy puppy slippers). She also apparently has a bit of a sweet tooth. (These traits may imply that a part of Doctor K's mental state is still childlike, most likely due to not having a normal childhood.) From a young age, Doctor K showed signs of advanced intelligence and at the age of five, was whisked away by the staff members of a morally corrupt, top-secret military think tank code-named "Alphabet Soup"."Ranger Yellow, Part II" Once she arrived, the people there addressed her by the letter "K" and she was confined to a white-walled room in order to work on new government technology. She was raised on the belief that she was ill and allergic to sunlight and thus was never let outside, despite her wish to do so. She was coerced into working constantly on various difficult tasks while in the facility and as the years passed, she eventually found that she could no longer remember her real name."Doctor K" Doctor K was the leader of a research team at Alphabet Soup developing exoskeleton robotic suits to amplify human strength and speed. They were attempting to harness the human body’s natural electrical output to prolong the suit’s battery life when they had a breakthrough: the discovery of a universal bio-electric field, an unseen energy grid that connects the life force of all living things. Manipulating this field allowed unimagined advances in technology, including the RPM Ranger Suits & Powers. (Longtime Power Rangers fans would recognize that Doctor K and her team had managed to tap into the Morphing Grid, which was only touched upon briefly in previous Ranger series.) When Doctor K was about 14, she was presented with a pair of twins who were also occupants of Alphabet Soup named "Gem", and "Gemma". They were chosen to help with the Ranger project for the purpose of being test pilots for the suits and equipment. Doctor K initially did not like the twins. For her 14th birthday, Gem and Gemma gave Doctor K the first birthday present she ever received, despite knowing her apparent dislike of them. Overtime, she finally accepted the two as her friends. Later on while Doctor K was working on the Ranger Series, a butterfly somehow managed to make it into her workstation. When Doctor K went to follow the butterfly, she found a way out of the facility and subsequently also discovered that she was not allergic at all to the sunlight, realizing that those in charge of Alphabet Soup had been lying to her, Gem, and Gemma the entire time. This led to Doctor K's greatest mistake; in hopes of blinding Alphabet Soup's security servers long enough for her, Gem, and Gemma to escape, Doctor K uploaded a self-aware, self-generating computer virus "Venjix", for which she had written the base code for, to the facility's database. Before Doctor K could install the firewall to assure the virus would not escape beyond the walls of Alphabet Soup, the security men for the facility burst in and captured Doctor K, Gem, and Gemma, thus allowing the Venjix Virus to spread. A year later, the virus had infected over 37% of the world's computers and was still going. Two years later, Venjix had completely taken over the world's technology and waged war upon humanity. Doctor K sent out a distress call all over the world, urging the survivors to go to the domed city of Corinth. She was about to leave Alphabet Soup with the Ranger Series Technology, only to once again be cornered by the facility staff, who were determined to not let her leave. However, Gem and Gemma came to her rescue. They gave her an opening to get away, but stayed behind themselves in an attempt to retrieve the classified Gold and Silver series Ranger tech. Doctor K was devastated when she saw the wall cave in behind the two, believing them to be dead. She has been shown to still keep the ribbons that wrapped the gift they gave her as a keepsake."Doctor K" It wasn't until the Rangers relayed information that they'd spotted some mysterious gold and silver zords that she had any inkling that Gem and Gemma were still alive and upon reuniting with them, she broke down in tears."Ghosts" Doctor K is working alongside Colonel Truman, so it is believed that the RPM team is sanctioned by the defense forces of Corinth City. Everyday, Doctor K has to live with the fact that she created the virus that has almost completely destroyed all of mankind, a fact that she kept under wraps from the other Rangers until she was forced into a situation where revealing it was the only option to save Dillon from being taken over."Brother's Keeper" She continues to work at finding ways to save humanity and will not be satisfied until Venjix is completely destroyed. Due to her underdeveloped emotional state as a result of growing up in Alphabet Soup, Doctor K's relationship with all the Rangers is somewhat awkward even though as time passes, she begins to really care about them. She finally begins to open up more to the others when Gem and Gemma re-enter her life, encouraging her to increase her bond with her team. Her relationship with Ziggy however is most distinctly complicated and strained, as from early on, Doctor K displayed a very apparent lack of acknowledgement or respect towards him. She didn't hug Ziggy as she did the other rangers after her attempt at showing her appreciation towards them and tends to get easily exasperated by his personality. It is eventually revealed that Doctor K in fact doesn't hate Ziggy and seems to actually truly appreciate him when it is discovered that her computer password is his name, and also when she, to his surprise, allows him to take her outside for her birthday. Their relationship finally begins to turn around after they get trapped in a cave together and Ziggy brings it upon himself to make her smile during their dire situation, which he ultimately succeeds at. Doctor K's initial facade of indifference towards Ziggy is implied to have partly stemmed out of frustration and envy that he is able to do just fine despite being "stupid". After Venjix is apparently destroyed, Doctor K and Ziggy plan to open a school, where Doctor K will teach children bio-field physics and Ziggy will teach them the arts of shadow puppetry and cooking. She then locks up the RPM morphers for good, unaware Venjix now resides in the Red Morpher. Beast Morphers Doctor K will return in Season 2 of Beast Morphers. Notes *While normally relatively impassive even in an emotional state, Doctor K shows uncharacteristic rage when someone calls the Ranger suits 'spandex', her most notable reaction is towards a young boy. However, this does not apply to Gem and Gemma as they were her first true friends after Alphabet Soup kidnapped her. *She constantly referred to Ziggy by his ranger color until Venjix is defeated, suggesting she has found respect for him since the beginning. *K's act of hiding herself behind a computer monitor with her "name" visible and her voice distorted bears a similarity to the main antagonist of the manga/anime series Death Note, the detective L, who did the same thing to keep his identity a secret. *The violin piece she plays during her brainstorming is Caprice No. 24 in A Minor by Niccolò Paganini. *The rangers usually tried to dismiss Doctor K as a true mentor, always stating that she was younger than them. *Doctor K is the first good character in the Power Rangers franchise to be directly responsible for the villains' rise to power. (Dr. O from Dino Thunder may count as the first, but it is debatable whether his actions were directly responsible for Mesogog's rise.) Technically though, it was Alphabet Soup's hubris that led K to do this in the first place, making them indirectly responsible for the events of RPM. *Olivia Tennet, who plays Doctor K, was 17 years old when production began on the series and 18 by the time the series aired. Appearance Doctor K is a Caucasian female with chin-length black hair and blue eyes. At the beginning of the series, she only communicated with people through the computer. All that was seen was a white screen with the letter K on it with a speech graph underneath. Her voice was also distorted which led to some confusion about her gender, as initially she was referred to as male. As a teenager, she has been pointed out to be younger than all of the RPM Rangers and is in fact the youngest Power Rangers mentor to date. Appearances See Also Notes and references Category:RPM Category:PR Mentors Category:Doctor